my problem is very similar to the question asked here: http://www.tecplottalk.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1080. Since I need to track particle information in a 3D space over time it would be convenient to be able to display the entire trace without having to save the information about all previous steps. From the post mentioned above it appears to not be possible with the UI, it would be nice if someone could either proof me wrong or give me a hint on how to achieve the effect (basically displaying a new zone in every timestep without deleting the display of the previous timesteps where every timestep is saved in a zone) using macros.